My given name is David. Family members still call me that. Everybody else calls me Doc. Since people often ask me where that nickname came from, and since apparently I haven’t answered it anywhere I can now find online, here’s the story.

Thousands of years ago, in the mid-1970s, I worked at a little radio station owned by Duke University called WDBS. (A nice history of the station survives, in instant-loading 1st generation html, here. I also give big hat tip to Bob Chapman for talking Duke into buying the station in 1971, when he was still a student there.)

As signals went, WDBS was a shrub in grove of redwoods: strong in Duke’s corner of Durham, a bit weak in Chapel Hill, and barely audible in Raleigh—the three corners of North Carolina’s Research Triangle. (One of those redwoods, WRAL, was audible, their slogan bragged, “from Hatteras to Hickory,” which is about 320 miles as the crow flies.)

As a commercial station, WDBS had to sell advertising. This proved so difficult that we made up ads for stuff that didn’t exist. That, in addition to selling ads, was my job. The announcer’s name I used for many of the ads, plus other humorous features, was Doctor Dave. It wasn’t a name I chose. Bob Conroy did that. I also had a humorous column under the same name for the station’s monthly arts guide, with the image above at the top of the page. That one was created by Ray Simone.

Ray and David Hodskins, another WDBS listener, later approached me with the idea of starting an ad agency, which we did: Hodskins Simone & Searls. Since we already had a David, everybody at the agency called me Doctor Dave, which quickly abbreviated to Doc. Since my social network in business far exceeded all my other ones, the name stuck. And there you have it.

Nobody is going to own podcasting. By that I mean nobody is going to trap it in a silo. Apple tried, first with its podcasting feature in iTunes, and again with its Podcasts app. Others have tried as well. None of them have succeeded, or will ever succeed, for the same reason nobody has ever owned the human voice, or ever will. (Other, of course, than their own.)

Because podcasting is about the human voice. It’s humans talking to humans: voices to ears and voices to voices—because listeners can talk too. They can speak back. And forward. Lots of ways.

Podcasting is one way for markets to have conversations; but the podcast market itself can’t be bought or controlled, because it’s not a market. Or an “industry.” Instead, like the Web, email and other graces of open protocols on the open Internet, podcasting is all-the-way deep.

Deep like, say, language. And, like language, it’s NEA: Nobody owns it, Everybody can use it and Anybody can improve it. That means anybody and everybody can do wherever they want with it. It’s theirs—and nobody’s—for the taking.

Both of those are tools created by Dave Winer, alpha dad of blogging, podcasting and syndicating. Dave was half the guests on Friday evening’s opening panel. The other half was Christopher Lydon, whose own podcast, Radio Open Source, was born out of his creative partnership with Dave in the early chapters of podcasting’s Genesis, in 2003, when both were at Harvard’s Berkman (now Berkman Klein) Center.

One way you can tell nobody owns podcasting is that 1.5 decades have passed since 2003 and there are still no dominant or silo’d tools either for listening to podcasts or for making them.

On the listening side, there is no equivalent of, say, the browser. There are many very different ways to get podcasts, and all of them are wildly different as well. Remarkably (or perhaps not), the BigCo leaders aren’t leading. Instead they’re looking brain-dead.

The biggest example is Apple, which demonstrates its tin head through its confusing (and sales-pressure-intensive) iTunes app on computers and its Podcasts app, defaulted on the world’s billion iPhones. That app’s latest version is sadly and stupidly rigged to favor streaming from the cloud over playing already-downloaded podcasts, meaning you can no longer listen easily when you’re offline, such as when you’re on a plane. By making that change, Apple treated a feature of podcasting as a bug. Also dumb: a new UI element—a little set of vertical bars indicating audio activity—that seems to mean both live playing and downloading. Or perhaps neither. I almost don’t want to know at this point, since I have come to hate the app so much.

Other tools by smaller developers (e.g. Overcast) do retain the already-downloaded feature, but work in different ways from other tools. Which is cool to me, because that way no one player dominates.

On the production side there are also dozens of tools and services. As a wannabe podcaster (whose existing output is limited so far to three podcasts in twelve years), I have found none that make producing a podcast as easy as it is to write a blog or an email. (When that happens, watch out.)

So here’s a brief compilation of my gatherings, so far, in no order of importance, from the conference.

Podcasting needs an unconference like IIW (the next of which happens the first week of May in Silicon Valley): one devoted to conversation and forward movement of the whole field, and not to showcasing panels, keynotes or sponsoring vendors. One advantage of unconferences is that they’re all about what are side conversations at standard keynote-and-panel conferences. An example from my notes: Good side conversations. One is with Sovana Bailey McLain (@solartsnyc), whose podcast is also a radio show, State of the Arts. And she has a blog too. The station she’s on is WBAI, which has gone through (says Wikipedia) turmoil and change for many decades. An unconference will also foster something many people at the conference said they wanted: more ways to collaborate.

Now is a good time to start selling off over-the-air radio signals. Again from my notes… So I have an idea. It’s one WBAI won’t like, but it’s a good one: Sell the broadcast license, keep everything else. WBAI’s signal on 99.5fm is a commercial one, because it’s on the commercial part of the FM band. This NY Times report says an equivalent station (WQXR when it was on 96.3fm) was worth $45 million in 2009. I’m guessing that WBAI’s licence would bring about half that because listening is moving to Net-connected rectangles, and the competition is every other ‘cast in the world. Even the “station” convention is antique. On the Net there are streams and files:stuff that’s live and stuff that’s not. From everywhere. WBAI (or its parent, the Pacifica Foundation), should sell the license while the market is still there, and use the money to fund development and production of independent streams and podcasts, in many new ways. Keep calling the convening tent WBAI, but operate outside the constraints of limited signal range and FCC rules.

Compared to #podcasting, the conventions of radio are extremely limiting. You don’t need a license to podcast. You aren’t left out of the finite number of radio channels and confined geographies. You aren’t constrained by FCC anti-“profanity” rules limiting freedom of speech—or any FCC rules at all. In other words, you can say what the fuck you please, however you want to say it. You’re free of the tyranny of the clock, of signposting, of the need for breaks, and other broadcast conventions. All that said, podcasting can, and does, improve radio as well. This was a great point made on stage by the @kitchensisters.

Podcasting conventionally copyrighted music is still impossible. On the plus side, there is no license-issuing or controlling entity to do a deal with the recording industry to allow music on podcasts, because there is nothing close to a podcasting monopoly. (Apple could probably make such a deal if it wanted to, but it hasn’t, and probably won’t.) On the minus side, you need to “clear rights” for every piece of music you play that isn’t “podsafe.” That includes nearly all the music you already know. But then, back on the plus side, this means podcasting is nearly all spoken word. In the past I thought this was a curse. Now I think it’s a grace.

Today’s podcasting conventions are provisional and temporary. A number of times during the conference I observed that the sound coming from the stage was one normalized by This American Life and its descendants. In consonance with that, somebody put up a slide of a tweet by @emilybell:podcast genres : 1. Men going on about things. 2. Whispery crime 3.Millennials talking over each other 4. Should be 20 minutes shorter. We can, and will, do better. And other.

Maybe podcasting is the best way we have to start working out our problems with race, gender, politics and bad habits of culture that make us unhappy and thwart progress of all kinds. I say that because 1) the best podcasting I know deals with these things directly and far more constructively than anything I have witnessed in other media, and 2) no bigfoot controls it.

Archiving is an issue. I don’t know what a “popup archive” is, but it got mentioned more than once.

Podcasting has no business model. It’s like the Internet, email and the Web that way. You make money because of it, not with it. If you want to. Since it can be so cheap to do (in terms of both time and money), you don’t have to make money at it if you don’t want to.

I’ll think of more as I go over more of my notes. Meanwhile, please also dig Dave’s take-aways from the same conference.

Since the form of a WordPress blog (which this is) favors writing long pieces over short ones, that’s mostly what I’ve written here, since I started in August 2007. Essays, you might say.

Since the form of a 1999.io blog is writing pieces of any length, and posting them easily from a WYSIWYG editor, I’ve been blogging there instead of here. At least lately. My last post here was on June 29. Since then I’ve put up 31 posts at 1999.io:

For some reason, many or most of the images in this blog don’t load in some browsers. Same goes for the ProjectVRM blog as well. This is new, and I don’t know exactly why it’s happening.

So far, I gather it happens only when the URL is https and not http.

Okay, here’s an experiment. I’ll add an image here in the WordPress (4.4.2) composing window, and center it in the process, all in Visual mode. Here goes:

Now I’ll hit “Publish,” and see what we get.

When the URL starts with https, it fails to show in—

Firefox ((46.0.1)

Chrome (50.0.2661.102)

Brave (0.9.6)

But it does show in—

Opera (12.16)

Safari (9.1).

Now I’ll go back and edit the HTML for the image in Text mode, taking out class=”aligncenter size-full wp-image-10370 from between the img and src attributes, and bracket the whole image with the <center> and </center> tags. Here goes:

Hmm… The <center> tags don’t work, and I see why when I look at the HTML in Text mode: WordPress removes them. That’s new. Thus another old-school HTML tag gets sidelined. 🙁

Okay, I’ll try again to center it, this by time by taking out class=”aligncenter size-full wp-image-10370 in Text mode, and clicking on the centering icon in Visual mode. When I check back in Text mode, I see WordPress has put class=”aligncenter” between img and src. I suppose that attribute is understood by WordPress’ (or the theme’s) CSS while the old <center> tags are not. Am I wrong about that?

Now I’ll hit the update button, rendering this—

—and check back with the browsers.

Okay, it works with all of them now, whether the URL starts with https or http.

So the apparent culprit, at least by this experiment, is centering with anything other than class=”aligncenter”, which seems to require inserting a centered image Visual mode, editing out size-full wp-image-whatever (note: whatever is a number that’s different for every image I put in a post) in Text mode, and then going back and centering it in Visual mode, which puts class=”aligncenter” in place of what I edited out in text mode. Fun.

Here’s another interesting (and annoying) thing. When I’m editing in the composing window, the url is https. But when I “view post” after publishing or updating, I get the http version of the blog, where I can’t see what doesn’t load in the https version. But when anybody comes to the blog by way of an external link, such as a search engine or Twitter, they see the https version, where the graphics won’t load if I haven’t fixed them manually in the manner described above.

So https is clearly breaking old things, but I’m not sure if it’s https doing it, something in the way WordPress works, or something in the theme I’m using. (In WordPress it’s hard — at least for me — to know where WordPress ends and the theme begins.)

Dave Winer has written about how https breaks old sites, and here we can see it happening on a new one as well. WordPress, or at least the version provided for https://blogs.harvard.edu bloggers, may be buggy, or behind the times with the way it marks up images. But that’s a guess.

I sure hope there is some way to gang-edit all my posts going back to 2007. If not, I’ll just have to hope readers will know to take the s out of https and re-load the page. Which, of course, nearly all of them won’t.

It doesn’t help that all the browser makers now obscure the protocol, so you can’t see whether a site is http or https, unless you copy and paste it. They only show what comes after the // in the URL. This is a very unhelpful dumbing-down “feature.”

Brave is different. The location bar isn’t there unless you mouse over it. Then you see the whole URL, including the protocol to the left of the //. But if you don’t do that, you just see a little padlock (meaning https, I gather), then (with this post) “blogs.harvard.edu | Doc Searls Weblog • Help: why don’t images load in https?” I can see why they do that, but it’s confusing.

By the way, I probably give the impression of being a highly technical guy. I’m not. The only code I know is Morse. The only HTML I know is vintage. I’m lost with <span> and <div> and wp-image-whatever, don’t hack CSS or PHP, and don’t understand why <em> is now preferable to <i> if you want to italicize something. (Fill me in if you like.)

So, technical folks, please tell us wtf is going on here (or give us your best guess), and point to simple and global ways of fixing it.

Chris Cree who experienced the same problem discovered that the WP_SITEURL and WP_HOME constants in the wp-config.php file were configured to structure URLs with http instead of https. Cree suggests users check their settings to see which URL type is configured. If both the WordPress address and Site URLs don’t show https, it’s likely causing issues with responsive images in WordPress 4.4.

Two things here:

I can’t see where in Settings the URL type is mentioned, much less configurable. But Settings has a load of categories and choices within categories, so I may be missing it.

I wonder what will happen to old posts I edited to make images responsive. (Some background on that. “Responsive design,” an idea that seems to have started here in 2010, has since led to many permutations of complications in code that’s mostly hidden from people like me, who just want to write something on a blog or a Web page. We all seem to have forgotted that it was us for whom Tim Berners-Lee designed HTML in the first place.) My “responsive” hack went like this: a) I would place the image in Visual mode; b) go into Text mode; and c) carve out the stuff between img and src and add new attributes for width and height. Those would usually be something like width=”50%” and height=”image”. This was an orthodox thing to do in HTML 4.01, but not in HTML 5. Browsers seem tolerant of this approach, so far, at least for pages viewed with the the http protocol. I’ve checked old posts that have images marked up that way, and it’s not a problem. Yet. (Newer browser versions may not be so tolerant.) Nearly all images, however, fail to load in Firefox, Chrome and Brave when viewed through https.

So the main question remaining are:

Is this something I can correct globally with a hack in my own blogs?

If so, is the hack within the theme, the CSS, the PHP, or what?

If not, is it something the übergeeks at Harvard blogs can fix?

If it’s not something they can fix, is my only choice to go back and change every image from the blogs’ beginnings (or just live with the breakage)?

If that’s required, what’s to keep some new change in HTML 5, or WordPress, or the next “best practice” from breaking everything that came before all over again?

Thanks again for all your help, folks. Much appreciated. (And please keep it coming. I’m sure I’m not alone with this problem.)

Stop now and go to TimeWellSpent.io, where @TristanHarris, the guy on the left above, has produced and gathered much wisdom about a subject most of us think little about and all of us cannot value more: our time.

Both of us will be co-investing some time tomorrow afternoon at the @BerkmanCenter, talking about Tristan’s work and visiting the question he raises above with guidance from S.J. Klein.

So, to help us get started, here’s a quick story, and a context in the dimension of time…

Many years ago a reporter told me a certain corporate marketing chief “abuses the principle of instrumentality.”

Totally knocked me out. I mean, nobody in marketing talked much about “influencers” then. Instead it was “contacts.” This reporter was one of those. And he was exposing something icky about the way influence works in journalism.

At different times in my life I have both spun as a marketer and been spun as a reporter. So hearing that word — instrumentality — put the influence business in perspective and knocked it down a notch on the moral scale. I had to admit there was a principle at work: you had to be a tool if you were using somebody as as one.

Look back through The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, and you’ll see what I mean. Nobody was better than Ole’ Steve at using journalists. (Example: Walt Mossberg.) And nobody was better at exposing the difference between sausage and shit than Dan Lyons, who wrote that blog as Fake Steve. (Right: you didn’t want to see either being made. Beyond that the metaphor fails.)

Anyway, visiting the influence thing is a good idea right now because of this:

And this:

I call it a bubble and blame data. But that’s just to get the conversation started.

See (some of) you there.

(For a more positive spin, see this this bonus link and look for “We are all authors of each other.”)

Here is a list of pieces I’ve written on what has come to be known as the “adblock wars.” That term applies most to #22 (written August of ’15) those that follow. But the whole series works as a coherent whole that might make a good book if a publisher is interested.

In Snow on the Water I wrote about the ‘low threshold of death” for what media folks call “content” — which always seemed to me like another word for packing material. But its common parlance now.

For example, a couple days ago I heard a guy on WEEI, my fave sports station in Boston, yell “Coming up! Twenty-five straight minutes of content!”

Still, it’s all gone like snow on the water, melting at the speed of short term memory decay. Unless it’s in a podcast. And then, even if it’s saved, it’ll still get flushed or 404’d in the fullness of time.

So I think about content death a lot.

Back around the turn of the millennium, John Perry Barlow said “I didn’t start hearing the word ‘content’ until the container business felt threatened.” Same here. But the container business now looks more like plumbing than freight forwarding. Everything flows. But to where?

My Facebook timeline, standing in the vertical, looks like a core sample of glacier ice, drilled back to 1947, the year I showed up. Memory, while it lasts, is of old stuff which in the physical world would rot, dry, disintegrate, vanish or lithify from the bottom up.

But here we are on the Web, which was designed as a way to share documents, not to save them. It presumed a directory structure, inherited from Unix (e.g. domain.something/folder/folder/file.html). Amazingly, it’s still there. Whatever longevity “content” enjoys on the Web is largely owed to that structure, I believe.

But in practice most of what we pile onto the top of the Web is packed into silos such as Facebook. What happens to everything we put there if Facebook goes away? Bear in mind that Facebook isn’t even yet a decade old. It may be huge, but it’s no more permanent than a sand dune. Nothing on the Web is.

Everything on the Web, silo’d or not, flows outward from its sources like icebergs from glaciers, melting at rates of their own.

The one exception to that rule is the Internet Archive, which catches as much as it can of all that flow. Huge thanks to Brewster Kahle and friends for giving us that.

Anyway, just wanted to share some thoughts on digital mortality this morning.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that I’ve been quiet here for a bit. One reason is that I’ve been traveling almost constantly, and not always in the best position to blog (or even tweet). Another is that I’ve been liveblogging instead. So here, latest first, is a list of liveblog postings since my last post here: